He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.  John  13:2 

In February 1882, forty-year-old Father Nelson Henry Baker stepped off the train at the rudimentary Woodlawn Beach station in Western New York State. Not finding anyone there to greet him, he began walking up the dirt road, suitcases in hand. Eventually a farmer offered him a ride on his hay wagon and deposited him on on on the Catholic boys’ asylum at  a rural crossroads.

St. John’s Protectory was not a happy place.  Its inmates were boys between the ages of  7 and 15, judged in police court to be “idle, truant, vicious, homeless or vagrant.  The facility was staffed by French-Canadian and Irish nuns who cooked and taught classes along with black-cassocked lay brothers who served as guards and provided rudimentary technical education. Discipline was strict. Windows were barred to prevent boys from escaping, The boys  lived in cell-like rooms and infractions of the rules could lead to deprivation of food or a few days of solitary confinement. The inmates were provided with one change of clothing a week. Across the street from the Protectory was an orphanage for younger children where the discipline was less severe but living conditions were also difficult. The facilities were outdated, overcrowded, and in debt,  all which seemed beyond the capacity of one man to resolve.

But Father Nelson Baker brought more than piety to the task. Born in Buffalo in 1842, the eldest of four brothers, he had left high school at an early age to work in his father’s grocery store. He served briefly in the Union Army during the Civil War and operated a successful feed and grain store for several years before deciding to enter the seminary to train for the priesthood at the age of 27. As a priest, this was his first leadership assignment. 

At the time of Fr. Baker’s arrival, the two facilities were  $60,000 (equivalent to more than $1.8 million of today’s dollars) in arears. Meeting with a group of bankers and businessmen who were asking to be paid, the priest offered to immediately advance 50% of the loaned amounts in cash, with the remainder paid off in installments.  He then used money saved from his merchant days to pay off half of the loans, and began an intense letter writing campaign to make good the balance.

On a pilgrimage to Europe several years earlier he had been deeply moved by a visit to the church of Our Lady of Victory in Paris, and devotion to Mary under this title became his mantra. A year after his arrival at the Protectory he founded the Association of Our Lady of Victory. Soliciting assistance from sympathetic Catholic postmasters across the country, he obtained names and addresses of pious Catholic women.  Each night he wrote  letters asking women to join the Association for a membership fee of twenty-five cents a year. Slowly at first, but then increasing over time donations began to come in. With the help of the Association, he succeeded in paying off all debts within a few years.

The priest’s mild manner obscured a fierce sense of commitment to his young charges. He was frequently on the playground talking with the boys. He encouraged sports, and formed a school band. Over time, the boys, many of them fatherless, began to take pride in being described as “Father Baker’s boys.” The home was not a reformatory, Fr. Baker told a reporter in 1889. “These boys aren’t old enough to be classed as criminals. We don’t reform them. We protect them from the street, from drunken parents, from starvation, or what you will; give them a chance for book learning and teach them a trade.” Each day Fr. Baker would lead the boys in three cheers for our Lady of Victory. “He was the kindest man, I ever knew,” a long -time acquaintance recounted.

By 1900 the a much-enlarged facility, was equipped with large classrooms, six dining halls, and trade  school shops.  A chapel on the third floor was described as “one of the finest and largest to be found in any institution of the country, with a statue of Our Lady of Victory over the altar. A decade later Fr. Baker’s home accommodated 786 boys and featured an infants’ home as well. In 1919, he added a maternity hospital. His crowning building achievementy came in the aftermath of a fire in the belfry of an adjacent Catholic parish church that he served. As pastor, he undertook construction of a massive new church and in 1925 the Basilica of Our Lady of Victory was formally consecrated. At the time, the church was hailed as the most beautiful Catholic house of worship in the country. 

Now in his eighties,  Fr. Baker began an apostolate to bring blacks into the church that saw over 500 persons of color enter this program in its first year. During the Depression, he provided food, shelter and clothing to thousands of needy families of all religious faiths.  

There were many stories. “I came here when I was nine-years old”, a Father Baker boy narrated. “My father died and my mother couldn’t support me.   I was crying that day in a corner of the yard when an old man came up and talked to me. He talked gently to me for a long time and I wasn’t homesick any longer. I didn’t know it was Fr. Baker until afterwards.  I guess that was the last time I ever cried or was homesick.”  The unassuming priest, beloved by all who knew him, died on July 29th, 1936 at the age of 94.  Mourners, stretched out in a half mile line, filed past his casket.  All what Fr. Baker accomoplished he credited to the Virgin Mary. “They call me a wonder worker, I am not,” he once said. “Our Lady of Victory is the wonder worker…. It was God who did the work.” 

Our Lady of Victory Basilica and the Boys’ Protectory about 1930.

Fr. Baker’s work for the young and needy continues today under the name of Our Lady of Victories Charities.  His cause of canonization has been introduced and he was declared venerable in 2011 by Pope Benedict XVI.

April, 2026